How would you define what Bricsys is?
Bricsys is a global provider of engineering design and collaboration software. Our core brands include the BricsCAD® CAD platform and the Bricsys 247® collaboration solution. The company was founded in Belgium in 2002 and has since expanded globally with regional offices across all major geographies.
In late 2018, Bricsys was acquired by Hexagon AB, an established global leader in industrial information technology for over five decades.
How has that acquisition impacted Bricsys’ operations?
Bricsys continues to operate as an independent entity within Hexagon’s PPM division while closely collaborating with other major Hexagon divisional companies like Leica Geosystems and MSC Software.
Hexagon is a builder of acquired businesses and has continued to support Bricsys’ scale-up. In the two or so years since the Hexagon acquisition, Bricsys has experienced rapid growth with topline revenues and team size more than doubling.
What would you say differentiates BricsCAD from other CAD products in the market?
BricsCAD is a modern and innovative CAD platform for the AECO industry. We are unique in our ‘one platform, one file format’ approach that delivers 2D and 3D CAD, BIM, and Mechanical functionalities all on a single platform, and all in industry standard .dwg.
This is why we are a future-proof platform. Customers can adopt BricsCAD for its powerful 2D and 3D CAD features today and decide to progress to BIM and Mechanical at their own pace.
As a technology first company, Bricsys operates at the forefront of the CAD industry. Unlike other industry-standard CAD products, BricsCAD is continuously evolving and improving, even on core 2D/3D CAD. We have added 100+ new features and workflows to BricsCAD every year since 2018, and we are the only software vendor delivering production ready Machine Learning features and functionalities in our commercial software.
Flexible licensing and fair pricing are also important to us. We offer customers full freedom in how they want to use BricsCAD – perpetual or subscription, single, volume or network – and offer follow-the-sun licensing out of the box, at no extra cost.
And finally, together with our local partners, we deliver industry leading post-sales technical and commercial support to our customers.
How would you say BricsCAD has evolved?
Bricsys was founded by Erik de Keyser in 2002, and BricsCAD V1 was released in 2005. Over the past two decades, our development teams have made incredible progress on our flagship product and our latest release is V21.
Since launching the BricsCAD Run-time Extension, or BRX API in 2007, we have added over 400 third-party application developers’ products to our online marketplace. 3D parametric solids modeling was added in 2010, at which time
BricsCAD was released on the Open Design Alliance platform. Five years ago, we introduced sheet metal design tools and offered the first release of our Building Information Modeling (BIM) workflow.
The story behind BricsCAD’s development is one that will continue to evolve to meet customer needs.
What role did Bricsys play in the development of the Open Design Alliance (ODA)?
Bricsys is a founding member of the ODA, the industry’s leading provider of .dwg compatibility technology. The ODA’s Drawings API, formerly known as Teigha, is used by hundreds of companies in thousands of engineering and design applications. Bricsys is recognized as the largest contributor of source code to the ODA’s continuous efforts to improve this shared platform.
As a company we are committed to an open and fair CAD industry.
Any software package should win market share based on the strengths of the technology and not by locking-in customers in a ‘walled garden’.
Why is BricsCAD a compatible and trusted alternative for existing CAD users?
The .dwg file format is the industry standard for CAD drawings globally, and BricsCAD uses .dwg as its native file format, by leveraging our partnership with the Open Design Alliance. BricsCAD was developed to ensure our customer’s existing LISP routines, menu files, macros, template files and more can move easily from other CAD products to BricsCAD.
Bricsys is the leading .dwg compatible CAD alternative to the industry incumbent product. What’s more, we offer a customer-first approach by providing greater speed and productivity at a lower cost of ownership, with more flexible
licensing options and outstanding support.
For these reasons and more, many of the world’s largest companies including STRABAG, Nippon Steel, Mitsubishi Electric and Stageco rely on BricsCAD for their core workflows.
What is in store for the company over the next five years?
We are technologists at heart and will continue pushing the envelope – in performance, in features and in usability.
We want to delight and surprise customers with our products, something that seems to have been lost in our industry.